Saturday, June 11, 2016

The
death of the Polisario Front leader, Mohamed Abdelaziz, in Algeria last week
has brought renewed attention to the conflict of the Western Sahara. While some
may hope for some overture in the conflict, his demise will not usher in a
grand shift in the Polisario Front’s hardline rejectionist strategy for Sahrawi
independence. An uncompromising strategy that is shaped in Algiers rather than
in the Polisario Front’s camps in Tindouf, Algeria. The future leadership of
the Polisario Front, which will be elected after the perfunctory mourning
period, will continue the Front’s military and political reliance on Algeria as
an integral party in the stalemated conflict.

Mohamed
Abdelaziz, a native of Marrakech, Morocco, had been secretary general of the
Polisario Front since 1976, a year after Morocco annexed the contested territory
of the Western Sahara from Spanish colonial administration. During Abdelaziz’s
leadership, the Polisario Front pursued an obdurate secessionist campaign for
independence, fighting a guerilla warfare from 1975 until 1991 when the UN
brokered a ceasefire with the aim of establishing a referendum for
self-determination. Almost three decades later, no such plebiscite has taken
place and the conflict has effectively descended into a regional quagmire.
Despite many UN attempts to negotiate a comprehensive settlement to the
conflict, all parties continue to advance their own intransigent claims.

With
Abdelaziz at the helm of the Polisario Front, the separatist movement’s biggest
achievement has undoubtedly been the high profile international attention this
little known conflict has continued to garner. Abdelaziz’s public relations
approach has framed the conflict in colonial terms, as the Polisario, somewhat successfully
cast the Moroccan annexation and subsequent rule over the Western Sahara as a
foreign colonial occupation in violation of self-determination principles. In
so doing, it managed to deemphasize the historical and cultural roots that link
the region to Moroccan territorial claims. The success of this discourse of
occupation was recently on display during the UN Secretary General Ban Ki
Moon’s visit to the Sahrawi camps. As the Secretary General toured the camps,
he recklessly and most undiplomatically, called Morocco’s control of the
territory “an occupation” much to the furore of
Morocco.

The
Polisario increasingly capitalized on nongovernmental organizations’ scathing reports of Moroccan human rights
violations in the territory to frame the conflict as a struggle against
authoritarianism. Abdelaziz even courted the support of celebrities like
Spanish actor Javier Bardem, who made a documentary film, “Sons of the Clouds:
The Last Colony," on the Western Sahara that claims to shed light on the
Moroccan control of the territory and abuses of human rights. The documentary,
probably wouldn’t have caught anyone’s attention, including a high-level
congressional viewing, if it were not the project of the Hollywood A-lister and
Oscar-winning actor.

Beyond the use of public relations and the media, Abdelaziz has rejected
any proposals calling for anyting short of full independence of the territory,
even when Morocco compromised in its position and offered a plan for Sahrawi autonomy under Moroccan
sovereignty in 2007. The plan has US, France and Spain's support, but the
Polisario and its patron, Algeria, have rejected the plan as a mere Moroccan
attempt to legitimize its de facto control of the territory. The talks between
the two parties (some say three parties including Algeria) to work on
confidence-building measures have led nowhere over the last few years, and change
in leadership of the Polisario will likely not result in any breakthrough in
the polisario rejectionist position, that primarily centers around the right of
the Sahrawis to self-determination. Such principle, while affirmed by international
norms, is unlikely to yield any practical comprehensive solution to the
conflict.

Modern conception of self-determination could grant people in the
Western Sahara a choice for autonomy and sovereignty. However, it does not lay
down the parameters of defining such people. A simple theoretical discussion on
the evolution of the norm of self-determination leaves us with the contentious
question of who is entitled to take part in deciding the future of the Western
Sahara through the UN sponsored referendum. To be sure, the dizzying number of
UN resolutions, as the Western Sahara conflict shows, fail to demarcate the
contours within which an identity exists, while clearly positing the right of
self-determination as sine qua non to self-governance. However, such
conceptualization of the Western Sahara case also reflects the United Nations’
lack of historical considerations of the territory, which could have enriched
its understanding of the complex identity issues that are at stake for all
parties involved in the conflict.

The application of self-determination also discounts historical relationships
of allegiance that existed between Moroccan sultans and leading Sahrawi tribes.
These allegiance rapports were recognized in the International Court of Justice’s
famous advisory opinion in 1975. Boundaries of the territory itself are
colonial creations and were drawn with no respect for existing nomadic tribes
that roamed the whole Saharan and Sahel regions. Self-determination of peoples,
in the Western Sahara (as demarcated now), legitimizes colonial structures that
were imposed in the first place. In other words, the United Nations’ attempt to
implement the referendum for self-determination in the Western Sahara is based
on colonial imposed demarcations of the region, and as such, it cannot result
in an adequate resolution to the conflict.

In addition to identity and historical factors, the fight over the
Western Sahara is mostly beset by regional and international factors. Past non-interventionist
strategies followed by major international powers and lack of international
urgency of the issue contributed to prolonging the conflict. Only targeted
pressure and active diplomatic engagement from the United States, France or the
European community as a block can provide a window of hope in the resolution of
the dispute, and a much needed relief to the plight of the thousands of
Sahrawis in the camps of Tindouf.

Most importantly, the nature of inter-Maghrebi politics, especially, the
rivalry between Morocco and Algeria has fueled the conflict and has exacerbated
the situation in the territory. Domestic issues have further fomented this
rivalry namely the role of the military in Algeria, and its hard line strategy
vis-à-vis the conflict in the Western Sahara. While Morocco has offered a
slight compromise with the autonomy plan, there is still mass domestic support
for the “Moroccanity” of the Western Sahara and the territorial integrity of
Morocco.

The passing of the long time leader of the Polisario Front, Mohamed
Abdelaziz, won’t do much to alter this complex web of realities. The next
leader of the Polisario will still take major cues from “Le Pouvoir” up in Algiers, while any prospects of regional
integration and cooperation necessary to face the security challenges in north
Africa and the Sahel region will continue to stall.

One of the problem with modern day journalism is the tendency to
sensationalize stories, and the use of catchy dramatic titles, often with
little analytical nuance and value. Leela Jacinto’s piece in Foreign Policy this week subscribes to
this unfortunate trend of parachute journalism that labors to grasp at straws
of relevance, but sadly fails to deliver. The article is misleading both in its
title and content. The author makes a number of questionable blanket statements
in its attempt to establish a tenuous link between the recent wave of terrorism
in France and Belgium, and the northern mountainous region of Rif in Morocco,
where some of the terrorists claim ancestral homeland. Jacinto goes even
farther than this, making the unsubstantiated assertion that the Rif region is
the “heartland of global terrorism” – not
Molenbeek, Raqqa, or Waziristan. She writes:

“At
the heart of terrorist strikes across the world over
the past 15 years lies the Rif. A mountainous region in northern Morocco,
stretching from the teeming cities of Tangier and Tetouan in the west to the
Algerian border in the east, the Rif is an impoverished area rich in marijuana
plants, hashish peddlers, smugglers, touts, and resistance heroes that has
rebelled against colonial administrators, postcolonial kings, and any authority
imposed from above. For the children of the Rif who have been transplanted to
Europe, this background can combine with marginalization, access to criminal
networks, and radicalization to make the vulnerable ones uniquely drawn to acts
of terrorism.”

What evidence does Jacinto present to substantiate these claims?
Notorious terrorists such as Najim Laachouri and the parents of Salah Abdeslam
were born in Morocco in the Rif. That evidence seems thin. She does offer the
slight disclaimer at the end of paragraph that the ringleader of the Paris
attacks, Abdlehamid Abaaoud, didn’t
come from the Rif, which should provide an early debunking lacunae of the
entire premise of the article:

“Laachraoui
was Riffian: a Belgian national predominantly raised in the Schaerbeek
neighborhood of Brussels but born in Ajdir, a small Moroccan town with a proud
Rif history. Paris attack suspect Salah Abdeslam and his brother Brahim, who
was one of the Paris attackers who targeted bars and restaurants in the 10th
and 11th arrondissements before blowing himself up at a popular Paris eatery on
Nov. 13, 2015, were also both Riffian by parentage. (Ringleader Abdelhamid
Abaaoud was not of Riffian origin, for what it’s worth — his family came from
southern Morocco.)

Jacinto’s
article does not offer any analysis of the complex radicalization and
indoctrination of these primarily European citizens. Not a single one of these
terrorists was radicalized, indoctrinated, or trained in the Rif Mountains. None
of them lived, if at all, in the Rif for any extensive period of time. The fact
that they or their parents were born in one of the most marginalized, poorest
regions in Morocco, home to cannabis, contraband smuggling, and violent history
with colonialism and the autocratic Makhzen state are indicators that the
essence of radical religious terrorism that is gripping Europe and the world
today lies in the Rif Mountains.

The
Riffian identity and culture, and the “baggage of neglect”, as the article
contends without any shred of evidence sociological or otherwise, is
radicalizing. Placed in a comparative perspective, Jacinto claims that Turkish
Belgians are not as militant as Moroccan Belgians, simply because they are not
exposed to Arabic Wahhabi literature. Either Jacinto does not know, or prefers
to ignore the fact that the Wahhabi ideology has been long translated to many
world languages, including Turkish.Moreover, we know that several of these European Muslim terrorists do
not speak Arabic and rely on translated videos and literature of radical
Islamism. ISIS has also been more successful in recruiting homegrown European
terrorists in their own language. But more devastating to the article is the
lack of basic facts about the Rif. Riffians are predominantly Amazigh, who are
ethnically and linguistically not
Arab, and do not speak Arabic. According to Jacinto’s argument, they are as
foreign to Wahhabi ideology disseminated in the Arabic language as the Turks
are.

The
author also makes the feeble argument that the secular cultural history of
modern Turkey explains the lack of Turkish terrorists in Europe. No evidence is
provided of this – only the conjecture of one of the sources in her article.
However, we know that there are a number of Turkish terrorists fighting for
ISIS. According to the Soufan group, there are 2,100 Turkish
fighters with ISIS, the fourth largest contingency of radical Islamists after
Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and Russia (not an Arab-speaking country).

The
general premise is that these Riffians or their parents brought a sort of baggage
of marginalization with them to Europe, which facilitated their radicalization,
regardless of their early criminal background or individual alienation in a
society that seeks to radically assimilate them as European citizens only.

Jacinto seems to think that all she needs to do is point out
that some of the recent terrorists in Europe are from Moroccan-Riffian descent
in order to offer conclusive proof of a Moroccan-Riffian radical gene. That is
a dangerously false assertion on a number of levels. First of all, these
terrorists are more Belgian or French than Moroccan. Some don't even speak the
Amazigh dialects or associate culturally or cognitively with their land of
origin. Their radicalization happened in Europe and their malaise is a European
one of integration and assimilation, legitimized by reference to a violent
religious eschatology. The problem is located more in European societies where
the radicalized Moroccan transplants are liminal individuals with a dangerous
sense of identity crisis.

One
of the major characteristics of religious terrorism is that sense of alienation
in one’s society as evidenced by generations of religious extremists from the
Christian identity movement at the heart of the Oklahoma City bombing, to the Jewish
zealotry of Baruch Goldstein, and the apocalyptic world view of Aum Shinrikyo’s
perverted Buddhism in Japan. The sense of marginalization of a great number of
Muslims feel at home, be it in the Muslim majority states under the yoke of
authoritarian rule, or in European countries facing a divisive dangerous
identity crisis. These radical outsiders view themselves at the fringe of their
socio-political system, where violence becomes a sacramental act justified by ossified
religious principles, and legitimized through a reference to a transcendent
violent passage to the afterlife.

The
article commits the sin of collectivization and cast the whole Rif region in
disrepute. Rif is among one of the most disadvantaged regions in Morocco, with
a particularly bloody history of state violence. But several regions in Morocco
feature the same menu of socio-economic ostracism and pathologies, with little
or similar recourse to violence.

The fact that there are, indeed, violent terrorists who are born
and radicalized in Morocco is irrefutable. After all, there are more than 1200
Moroccans fighting for ISIS according to the Soufan group. But the facile
assumptions underpinning this article by an “award-winning international news
reporter,” and the sensationalized claim that the Rif is the hotbed of global
terrorism today are egregious and devoid of any analytical or empirical value. Radical
Islamism is not an ethnic issue, it is a complex set of religious,
socio-economic, and identity-based problems. ISIS has reprehensibly
demonstrated that violent Islamist extremism knows no national, ethnic, racial
or social boundaries. Its sources or hotbeds are only a reality in the mind of
frivolous journalists looking for sensationalized headlines.